Post #6

            I feel like the Protestant Reformation had both a negative and positive side effects on Northern European arts.  It allowed artists to venture into new realms of creativity, but also hindered certain artists to create pieces of work that were in their comfort zone concerning religious pieces.  Aside from artists having to search for new lines of work, it opened a path for violent destruction of valuable pieces of European religion.  As the book explains, iconoclasm was the act of smashing religious images during this time, and was very popular for those involved in the constant rebellion for the Protestant cause.

            However, this new opening wasn’t entirely bad for expanding the horizon of certain artists and opened new doors for these painters to express secular ideas throughout their work.  Some of these new ideas included patron works, which highlighted and emphasized self-portraits of themselves and their spouses.  Another aspect of creativity that arose during the sixteenth century consequently was the idea of landscapes and surreal ideas incorporated into real life paintings.  Some artists used this as the perfect excuse to get into expressing their own ideas without being persecuted from religious patrons.  On the other hand, this had the negative effect on some artists who were only content with working on religious pieces for churches or other religious members of society.

            I believe a perfect example of artists illustrating new ideas is Albrecht Altdorfer’s Danube Landscape (page 688 in the text); it has the perfect combination of new elements that help express the artist’s individual creativity.  This was one of the first times that an artist developed a painting based specifically on a landscape that included no religious figures, not to mention had no figures involved at all.  Like mentioned in the book, this idea of creating landscapes became wildly popular in the later sixteenth century as it allowed artists to create new coloring and sceneries.  Although artists still focused on sacred places within these paintings, it still suggested that artists had the ability to venture out into new techniques and ideas for creating their own desired masterpieces.

            While most pieces during the Catholic artistic period involved stories or biblical passages, it has now swayed to incorporating parts that don’t exactly fit the narrative, but somehow relate to the overall theme of the painting.  They weren’t exactly concerned with actual proportions as well, rather just the pure aesthetic image that is composed as a whole.  Patrons once suggested Catholic based religious paintings are now shifting their ideas and beliefs, resulting in requests for self-portraits instead.  Like mentioned before, secular ideas were more valued during this period as it laid a cloud of confusion over religious leaders all across Europe.